DAY 15: Mastering Picture Links

Here’s Day 15 and this is continuing on from out guest post series on Search Engine Optimization. If you haven’t completed yesterday’s lesson, you can read it at: DAY 14: Optimizing Your Content.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte -

Small trick, big difference

It’s a fact today that images are an integrand part of most of the pages designs and content. Having pictures make your site more vibrant, alive, and user friendly in many instances compare to a boring plain text site.

Today’s lesson is about helping you understand how search engines see your pictures and what you can do to influence what they see.

What you see is not what the search engine gets

What you see and what the search engines see when they crawl your page is not the same, but you already know that.

The reason is simple, many coding tricks, including the usage of CSS now allows us to make our site appearance much more user friendly, while maintaining a simple and easy to read page for the search engines without all the unnecessary clutter of layout junk.

The easiest way to get an idea of how the search engines see you page is simply by looking at it from a text browser. You can do that easily by looking at the cache version of your page.

Here’s my page as you see it:

And now, here’s my page as the search engines see it:

The problem with pictures

The main problem with using pictures on your page when it comes to SEO is the fact that the search engines don’t read pictures.

In a text version browser only (just like what the search engines see), pictures simply don’t exist at all, no mention of them at all.

That’s clearly another reason why when you use a picture link instead of a plain text link, this one has much less value.

Search engines can read your text link through the anchor text of this one, but since pictures are not read, the links from them don’t have anchor text!

The image link will then be interpreted as a plain URL, which is by far the lowest value for the search engines.

The “ALT” attribute

Do you remember the popular saying: “Do good things and you’ll be rewarded”?

Believe it or not, but everybody isn’t as fortunate as myself or yourself to be able to enjoy any type of webpages or browser display on internet.

This is why accessibility functions and tags have been created to help people who can’t enjoy pictures for example to still be able to comprehend what your site and the link of your picture (if you have one) is all about.

If your heart is kind enough to take on the extra steps to help those people better enjoy your site, you are simultaneously doing yourself a favor.

The “ALT” attribute has specially been designed to compensate for a picture that cannot be displayed, either because of a loading error, either because of the usage of a text browser only.

That is, instead of a picture, what you will see in the information you entered in the “ALT” attribute.

The “ALT” attribute is located between the tags of a picture in your HTML source code:

The important point here is the fact that search engines can’t read pictures, but they can read this “ALT” attribute!

What happened is that in the case of a picture link, the “ALT” attribute will then become the anchor text for the picture link!

Now you just dramatically increased the value of your images links!

Word of Caution

The main purpose of this attribute is still to provide the best description possible of what the picture it replaces actually is or what the link does.

Do not go in there stuffing loads of keywords, or you may just end up being penalized for over-optimization and being a spammer!

That doesn’t prevent you to have a nicely optimized picture anchor text link, just be honest with yourself and apply moderation.

Exercise

Today’s exercise is to make sure that all your images on your site have an “ALT” attribute, regardless of whether or not they are picture links.

Make the “ALT” of your regular pictures descriptive, possibly without keyword if it’s not related. Don’t go call a table corner picture “make money online, best way to make money, make more money online, make money online stuff”, calling this picture “border frame corner” may be way better.

Meanwhile, when using the “ALT” on a picture link, you can be more SEO oriented, but still with moderation, if you have a picture link for your newsletter, “Join my Make Money Online newsletter” may still be acceptable, but “make money online, best way to make money, make more money online, make money online stuff” still isn’t.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.